Trucks line the border fence in Otay Mesa on the Mexico side for the last mile before coming to the Port of Entry facility.

On a good day, Ruben Betancourt might spend two hours behind the wheel of a heavy-duty diesel truck hauling a cargo container from Tijuana to San Diego. Then he gets in line again, spending an hour to return to Mexico.

If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to turn around and repeat that cycle two more times — for a total of nine hours spent inching back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Betancourt is part of an army of Mexican short-distance truckers with iron endurance for long lines at the international border. They are sometimes known as drayage operators or burreros, Spanish for mule drivers. They haul goods between the two countries within a narrow geographic zone.

“It’s very tedious and very stressful,” said Betancourt, 43, a Mexico City native who has been a burrero for 12 years. “We just have to learn to relax.”

Supporters of the North American Free Trade Agreement say the burreros represent a costly and unnecessary step that hopefully will become obsolete one day. They dream of a time when trucks carrying cargo from anywhere in Mexico will be allowed to make deliveries anywhere in the United States, then return loaded with goods for Mexico.

But nearly 18 years after NAFTA was launched, this has yet to happen. Mexican trucking companies are largely barred from all but a small U.S. commercial zone — about 25 miles from border ports of entry. Last month, the Obama administration launched a pilot program that allows approved Mexican trucks to travel across the United States, but only one company has been cleared to participate.

In the meantime, thousands of burreros continue to play a central role in moving goods between the U.S. and Mexico, its third-largest trade partner.

“There’s a niche for them,” said Jaime González Luna, a logistics specialist and president of the Tijuana Economic Development Corporation.

Owners of trucking companies operating between Tijuana and San Diego said they’re not worried about being phased out by NAFTA. They’re most concerned about the California Air Resources Board’s new emission standards for diesel trucks and buses, which will be phased in starting Jan. 1. Vehicles that don’t meet those rules will need to be replaced or outfitted with costly filters.

Crossings slower

On a recent weekday, dozens of northbound trucks could be seen lining up in Tijuana outside the Otay Mesa commercial port of entry, where U.S. Customs and Border Protection counts an average of 2,050 truck crossings from Mexico each day.

By 10 a.m., Betancourt made his first crossing into San Diego for the day. Shortly afterward, he steered a 1982 Peterbilt with purple fenders into the queue of southbound trucks carrying empty containers back to Mexico.

He earns a base pay of $250 a week, though with extra crossings he can make up to $100 in commissions. Increased traffic and security measures have made it tougher to earn the extra income.

When Betancourt started as a burrero, he said, each crossing “was a lot faster.”

His employer is Transportes Internacionales Gonbu, a Tijuana company whose two dozen trucks mainly serve Tijuana’s export-oriented maquiladora factories and their foreign clients. The company charges $140 for a round trip; some competitors charge as much as $175.

Replacements needed

Gonbu is one of 8,289 Mexican carriers with permits from the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Administration that allow them to operate near ports of entry. In San Diego County, the designated zone stretches from Oceanside on Interstate 5 to Fallbrook along Interstate 15 and to Alpine along Interstate 8.

Luis González, the owner of Gonbu, said all of his trucks are at least 16 years old, and the new Air Resources Board rules mean he will have to replace them by 2014. “That is my big headache,” said González, who is weighing his options and considering whether to join forces with a U.S. freight transfer company. He would supply the drivers, and the other business would supply the vehicles.

“The Americans don’t want to go to Mexico,” González said. “The drivers are very expensive. They worry that their vehicles would be damaged, (and) about the long waits and lines to cross.”

Many Mexican trucking businesses have solved the problem by opening an affiliated company across the border.

Alfonso Esquer, who heads the Tijuana branch of Canacar, Mexico’s national trucking chamber, oversees two companies — Fletes Esquer in Baja California and Multimodal Esquer in San Diego. The Mexican drivers operate across northwest Mexico, while his U.S. drivers operate across the United States.

Opposition persists

The United States and Mexico exchanged about $393 billion in goods last year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Economists said trucks transported approximately 80 percent of those products, and a sizable portion of those trucks cross at Otay Mesa, one of the three busiest commercial crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The burreros “are performing a service, but it’s a service that doesn’t add value,” said Armando Chacón, an economist with the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness. “It’s a service that wouldn’t be needed if there were a free flow of cargo across the border.”

Members of the Teamsters union and other opponents of the NAFTA trucking provision continue to battle the presence of Mexican trucks on U.S. highways through lawsuits and congressional action. They said Mexican truckers would take away jobs, threaten highway safety and pose environmental problems with old vehicles.

Unlike the United States’ border with Mexico, its border with Canada faces no such controversy. For years, approved Canadian truckers have been able to operate anywhere in the United States.

“It’s worked, as far as I can see, quite smoothly,” said Gary C. Hufbauer, a NAFTA expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. The failure to adopt similar measures for Mexican trucks “is the biggest friction between the U.S. and Mexico today, in terms of ordinary commerce.”